Summary: When it come to grace, we are all in the same boat, we don’t deserve it but we desperately need grace.

1. Illustration: On Sunday, August 16,1987, Northwest Airlines flight 225 crashed just after taking off from the Detroit airport. 155 people were killed. One survived: a 4-year-old from Tempe, Arizona, named Cecelia. News accounts say when rescuers found Cecelia they assumed she had been a passenger in one of the cars on the highway onto which the plane crashed. But when the flight manifest was checked, there was Cecelia’s name. This little girl survived because, as the plane was falling, Cecelia’s mother unbuckled her own seat belt, got down on her knees in front of her daughter, wrapped her arms and body around Cecelia, and then would not let her go. Nothing could separate that child from her parent’s love--not tragedy or disaster, not the fall or the flames that followed, not height nor depth, not life nor death.

2. Most of us that are honest would agree with the song when it says "Amazing grace, how sweet the sound, that saved a wretch like me..."

3. However, some people get off base in one of two ways:

a. Either they have forgotten just how wretched they were before Christ.

b. Or for some reason they think other people are more wretched than they are.

Propostion: When it come to grace, we are all in the same boat, we don’t deserve it but we desperately need grace.

Transition: In the story of the Adulterous woman, we see...

I. The Ignorance of Grace (7:53-8:6)

A. What Do You Say?

1. This narrative begins with Jesus teaching in the temple early in the morning. His teaching is suddenly and rudely interrupted when the Scribes and Pharisees barge in with a woman in tow.

2. They bring her in the midst of all these people and sit right in the midst of them and says to Jesus, "Teacher, this woman was caught in adultery, in the very act."

3. The Greek construction of the sentence makes it clear that these men are making a legal claim: They possess the evidence the law requires to convict the woman. What evidence do they need?

a. So that suspicious husbands could not accuse their wives unnecessarily, the law required strong testimony from two witnesses who saw the couple in a sexual context: lying in the same bed, unmistakable body movements, and positive identities.

b. The two witnesses had to see these things at the same time and place so that their testimonies would be identical.

c. Such evidence virtually required the witnesses to set a trap. (Burge, NIV Application Commentary, New Testament: John, 242).

4. Notice what they say next to Jesus, "Now Moses, in the law, commanded us that such should be stoned. But what do You say?"

a. Now here lies a major flaw in there argument: that’s not all of what the law says.

b. Lev. 20:10 The man who commits adultery with another man’s wife, he who commits adultery with his neighbor’s wife, the adulterer and the adulteress, shall surely be put to death.

c. Where’s the guy?

5. John tells us in verse 6 what their agenda was: "This they said, testing Him, that they might have something of which to accuse Him."